New Age of Publishing – Guest Post 5 – April Hamilton

My new publishing series continues today with a post from April Hamilton called “How Meaningful A Metric Is Your Book’s Amazon Sales Rank?”, which is, obviously, all about the sales rank on Amazon. It makes for some pretty interesting reading. Check the links is April’s bio at the end, as there’s some good stuff in there. All yours, April:

How Meaningful A Metric Is Your Book’s Amazon Sales Rank?

Ah yes, the Amazon Sales Rank: that addictive bit of eye candy that can lift an author’s spirits into the stratosphere one day and hurl him down onto the rocks the next. In all likelihood neither reaction is truly justified, because a book’s Amazon Sales Rank is a temporary, relative thing, and does not mean what many authors think it does. If you want to get to the bottom of what your book’s ASR means, you might start by thinking about what the ASR does not mean.

First, it does not reflect a cumulative sales count. Let’s say Amazon has 1 million titles listed for sale on its site—it actually lists many more than that, but let’s keep the math simple. Let’s further say that Amazon opened its virtual doors exactly one year ago today, and your book is currently ranked #500,000. It would seem logical to assume the book that has sold the fewest copies over the past year would be ranked #1,000,000, the one that has sold the most copies would be ranked #1, and yours, ranked at #500,000, has sold exactly 499,000 fewer copies than #1 and 499,000 copies more than #1,000,000. But this is not true at all. Your book’s ASR is based on a much more complex algorithm that’s considered a trade secret by Amazon.

Second, your book’s ASR is not a dynamic line such as one might see on a sales chart, moving reliably upward each time a copy sells, and just as reliably downward when others’ books are selling and yours is not. ASR is recalculated hourly, and only includes titles that actually had sales activity during the hour in question, or were ranked within the top 100 in any category during that hour. This is how it’s possible for your book’s ASR to sometimes be higher than that of multi-million-selling books by authors along the lines of JK Rowling and Stephen King; if neither of them sold any copies in a given hour when you sold 2 copies of your book, your book’s rank will be higher than theirs’ for that hour. Your book is only being ranked relative to the performance of a small subset of all the books being offered for sale by Amazon.com.

Regarding that term, “sales activity,” shopping cart returns and other unusual circumstances are included under this umbrella. For example, if many copies of another book are sold and then returned in the same hour, that other book will take a Rank hit and every other book that shares a category with that book may get a Rank bump. Amazon will not reveal the specifics of precisely how it calculates rank, but I have observed this phenomenon with my own books—though not consistently.

Reconsider the above statement: Amazon will not reveal the specifics of precisely how it calculates sales rank. The formula is just as hotly debated, and about as arcane, as the answer to the question of how Google calculates its Page Ranks. However, in its Help pages Amazon openly states it does not share actual sales numbers for any product listed on its sites for “competitive reasons”. So the answer to the question, “What does my book’s Amazon Sales Rank mean?” is, strictly speaking, “No one really knows, except the keepers of Amazon’s ranking algorithm.” That doesn’t mean your book’s ASR is totally meaningless, though.

As your book’s ASR goes up, so does its visibility on the Amazon site, especially if you can crack the top 100 in any popular category. This is because Amazon provides hyperlinked top 100 lists in every major category right on its site. Your book is more likely to be noticed by folks browsing the site by category if it’s on one or more of those lists, and this tends to be come a self-feeding loop. More people see your book, which leads to more sales, which drives your ASR up, which leads to more people seeing your book, et cetera, et cetera. Also, the higher your book’s sales rank, the more likely it is to be recommended as a ‘buy this book and that book together’ candidate on other popular books’ product pages. This is the thinking behind the “Amazon Rush” book marketing tactic, in which you try to get as many people as possible to buy your book on the same day. If your rush is successful, your book gets that self-feeding ASR – visibility – sales cycle going.

Finally, note your book won’t have an ASR at all until at least one copy sells. From then on, it should continue to be ranked until it’s removed from sale by you or Amazon.

Apart from the context of a first sale, an Amazon Rush, or the top 100 best seller list in any category, you can’t really extrapolate all that much of value from your book’s Amazon Sales Rank. Feel free to go back to obsessing about your follower count on Twitter, instead.

7 Comments

April, that’s a great explanation of the ASR weirdness, and good to let authors know that it’s a pretty meaningless number most of the time. Just last night, I tried an experiment aimed at inducing people to buy some copies of one my press’s titles, one that had not sold at all in the previous month. It’s an item that we made available in print via Amazon’s print-on-demand service Createspace, so I am able to see as soon as next day what we have sold. We sold one single copy of that title last night. That one sale moved the book’s ranking from somewhere down in the 2.4 millionth rank all the way up to 115,000. It has since fallen to about 308,000. But that’s still a lot higher than it where it was at the start of yesterday, but I don’t think anything has happened other than that single copy selling which propelled it for the moment above the probably millions of items that did NOT sell a copy in recent hours. So, the ASR doesn’t tell much of a story, but I find it somewhat fun to check in that if I see a really huge upward jump in the number, then it usually means that we have just sold something (though it’s probably just one copy).

One of my novels, The Usurper, was on the Kindle Nation
Daily on Saturday, so I paid attention to the sales ranking and my
sales through DTP. I was selling way more for this novel than I
ever had for just one day, almost more than I had sold for the
novel in the 5 months it had been available on Kindle. The ranking
didn’t move at all until late afternoon, and looking at Metric
Junkie, and all those other ranking sites, the numbers weren’t
accurate even remotely. Almost three days later, and the reporting
is still inaccurate. I started at around 28k, and I did manage to
get to #37 in political thrillers in e-books and #70 in thrillers
in general, in spite of the ASR being buggy.

I KNOW it’s relatively meaningless but I check my ASR every
day. Sometimes twice a day! And yes, my spirits rise when my titles
do, and yes, when my ASR falls I resign myself to being a hasbeen.
But then I take another look… and another… and yes, I know it’s
all relatively meaningless, so why do I bother? I’ll tell you in a
second – just off to check my ASR…

Chris & Cliff – it all seems to amount to little more than stuff and nonsense, doesn’t it? I guess the bottom line is this: ASR is whatever Amazon wants it to be, and Amazon wants it to be something that will sell more books—not any specific book, just more books in general. And I have little doubt Amazon massages the formula from time to time; what affects ASR today may have no impact next month.

April, since I tend to like conspiracies when I write, I could imagine that there are some big name authors out there whose publishers pay Amazon to keep their authors at the top of certain genre lists. So Amazon plays with their sales ranking numbers to make sure some books stay in the top 10, and if any book that isn’t “approved” gets near the top 10, the ASR starts messing up. When the ASR is finally corrected hours or days later, that book is still in the top 100, but nowhere near the top 10. Now, I don’t really think that’s happening, but, it would make for a good thriller novel….

I had done an analysis of what influenced Amazon numbers a
while back
(http://www.caridad.com/2006/11/08/the-amazon-addiction/). I found
that ASR was good for determining if articles/promo/etc. had made
an impact, but the B&N numbers were a better resource for
determining if a book had legs on the shelves.

Cliff –
I don’t want to believe it’s true, but then again, it’s commonplace for publishers to “buy” prime brick-and-mortar bookstore real estate for their authors with reduced pricing and kickbacks, so I guess it’s possible.